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Open-Source AMD Cayman GPU KMS Support

03-02-2011, 10:20 PM

Phoronix: Open-Source AMD Cayman GPU KMS Support

Nearly two months ago AMD released Radeon HD 6000 series open-source support -- complete with kernel mode-setting and Mesa/Gallium3D OpenGL driver acceleration support -- but this support had only covered the "Northern Islands" ASICs and not the newest Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" graphics processors. Cayman's design is much different from the Northern Islands and previous-generation Evergreen GPUs, but the open-source support for these highest-end AMD graphics processors is beginning to emerge...

Has it occurred to you to start putting all of your benchmarking results over on openbenchmarking.org, even the ones you run in-house manually? Separation of concerns and all that.

But even with all your benchmark results shifted over there, it's exactly this kind of article that keeps me coming back to Phoronix. Summarizing info about happenings in the Linux performance / graphics / gaming / open source driver communities. Finding out about things I don't necessarily hear first-hand. This is why I don't want you to retire from being a Phoronix editor; or if you do, replace yourself with people who can capably fill your shoes as far as finding these excellent tidbits.

It's a news site, so give us more news. Thumbs-up for this post and others like it. The benchmarks can go "to that other site you run"

Comment

If you run a LiveCD, it's better to have an optimized driver than only vesa. And, if we want later 3D acceleration, this is a mandatory step to do.

GPL does not prevent usage of proprietary crap as basis(library, module etc), it does prevent inclusion of GPL code inside of proprietary crap. This means nothing except blob license itself prevents you to put fglrx or nvblob on livecd.

You can wait for you acceleration for 10 years, this is officially a legacy unsupported driver.

Whether someone does this or not, the open drivers should provide decent support for all the AMD hardware, which forms a good basis for the community to keep working on the drivers.

This is great news indeed.

Open drivers ... with decent support ... for all AMD hardware will take 15 years to accomplish, granted the development of AMD hardware will be frozen for that 15 years. AMD indeed deserves respect for documentation and some background support behind Gallium and FOSS drivers, but they do not consider this any serious.

This is like publishing "Learn to pilot the plane for dummies" book vs providing the plane itself.